Chris Jones

Sam Shepard died Thursday at age 73. From his initial off-Broadway successes as a writer, creating plays that were flush with music ranging from rock ’n’ roll (“The Tooth of Crime”) to bebop (“Suicide in B Flat”), his reckless, effusive stage poems held an audience’s attention even though they barely held together. His early work was pure sensation. Later came the better-behaved and more widely popular achievements, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Buried Child” and “Fool for Love,” populated by desperate relations in confined spaces.

As a screen actor, every space Shepard occupied seemed confined, somehow. His hardscrabble charisma wasn’t so much intense as withholding, in a...

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Sam Shepard died Thursday at age 73. From his initial off-Broadway successes as a writer, creating plays that were flush with music ranging from rock ’n’ roll (“The Tooth of Crime”) to bebop (“Suicide in B Flat”), his reckless, effusive stage poems held...

"A parrot, a shark and a cheeseburger walk into Wrigley Field" may sound like the beginning of a bad bar joke, but in reality it refers to just a few of the Parrothead characters who made their way to Wrigley Field on Saturday night to watch Jimmy Buffett...

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Irvine Welsh, the prolific Scottish author, became famous and successful in 1993 with the publication of his first novel, a rough-and-tumble tale of a group of heroin addicts and thieves in Edinburgh. It was titled "Trainspotting."
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Italian playwright Dario Fo, whose energetic mocking of Italian political life, social mores and religion won him praise, scorn and the Nobel Prize for Literature, died Thursday. He was 90.
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Among the comedy pilots CBS is shooting this spring is "Superior Donuts," based on the 2008 Tracy Letts play of the same name.
Like its source material, the pilot centers on the owner of a Chicago doughnut shop in a neighborhood going through some...

FRIDAY | "Cocked": Sarah Gubbins' new play is about an anti-gun Andersonville couple forced to confront the opposing viewpoints of a surprise guest. Through March 13 at Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave.; 773-871-3000 and www.victorygardens.org...

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"Writing" seems an inadequate word to describe what Stephen Sondheim has done, yet it is the breadth, impact and influence of his writing that have won him the 2011 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement. The 81-year-old composer and...